Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here.
In many ways we're in a bit of a pickle. I agree with you, Dr. Zacharias. In your opening statement you said we've put the cart before the horse. The reality is that we have no guidelines, no standards, no prescription levels. We don't know how often it should be taken, whether it should be taken in pill form, how much should be taken and for how long. That's a challenge.
It's a big challenge for us, because we've heard lots of testimony from veterans and from family members who've come in and said, for example, that they have their spouse back after dealing issues of PTSD, etc.
Dr. Zacharias, you made comments about opioids and how there is some indication or some link along those lines. We don't have research today. We can have anecdotal research, but ultimately the best research is an RCT. That's the only way we're going to know where we need to be on this. That's a challenge, because that research takes years to come up with.
How do we do that without falling into, as you indicated, Dr. Zacharias, the challenges we've seen with opioids and the side effects we had from their prescription?